Full transcript
0:00Optimism is the enemy of love. If we think that we will have a perfect love story, no,
0:07it's not going to happen. We need to accept that even a really good relationship has constant
0:12moments of crisis. So pessimism is not an enemy of love. Knowing that there is no such thing as
0:19the right person actually helps you to find a good enough person. You know, compatibility is
0:27not a precondition of love. Compatibility is the fruit of love. My name is Alain de
0:34Botton. I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist, and founder of the School of Life. The playbook for
0:41a successful relationship. First of all, the idea of a playbook sounds strange. The idea of
0:48a playbook that you need to create to get in a relationship sounds really odd. You think,
0:53"I don't need a playbook. "I just need to head on in there, get a dating app, "and off I go,
0:57and a nice new pair of clothes." But isn't it interesting, and wouldn't it be lovely,
1:01to have a playbook that would be trying to guide you to acquire the knowledge
1:07that you need for love? So the idea that love is a skill rather than an emotion is a strange one,
1:14but I think an absolutely essential one in the worldview that I'm positing. You know, if somebody
1:19said, "I'm going to climb Mount Everest or K2," you would say, "Okay, how have you prepared for
1:24this?" And you'd be expecting them to show up with ropes, with training programs, with oxygen,
1:30with specially prepared packs of food. You can get the metaphor. We walk into the mountain of love
1:37without sufficient preparation and equipment, and then we're surprised that we routinely tumble off
1:42the mountain and we blame the other person. We say we didn't match the right person. We haven't found
1:49our person. We go back on the dating app, and we go ever further to try and find the right person.
1:55Don't get me wrong, dating apps have their role. Sometimes we need to scan and see who's out there
2:00and find a person who halfway meets us where we want to be. But once you've found a more or less
2:06suitable person, that's when the work begins. And the work is to turn a stranger into somebody that
2:13you can understand and who can understand you without bottling it, without panicking,
2:18without throwing them in the bin, without saying, "We can't work this out." If after five weeks in a
2:23pleasant mini break in Copenhagen, we suddenly have a conflict. No, the point is you need to
2:28stay where you are and try and figure it out. But most people give up too soon. They say, "We can't
2:33possibly do this." And they run for the hills, go back on the dating app, and find the next person
2:38with whom they will then try out an equally unfulfilling attempt to match their heart with
2:43a stranger's. What we need to do is to start to create right people rather than search for them.
2:49And what does that mean to create a right person? It means to work on yourself psychologically and
2:55therapeutically so that you understand your script from childhood and do not simply play it out onto
3:02innocent person after innocent person, that you take responsibility for the problems that you
3:07are bringing into a relationship. At the School of Life, which I founded, an institution that is
3:13dedicated to emotional growth and development, we tell our people that when they honor date
3:17with somebody, among the first questions is to ask people playfully, "How are you crazy?" What does
3:23that mean? How are you crazy? Why is everybody crazy? They're not necessarily crazy. Well,
3:27all of us have stuff that we need to be on top of. And if your person at dinner says to you, "Yeah,
3:33I get the question. Yeah, I've got my crazy. And my crazy is this. My crazy is that. My father,
3:38my mother." This is turning out to be a safe person. If the person goes, "How do you mean?
3:43I can't possibly answer that question. That's rude. You think I'm not right or imperfect." Run
3:48for the hills. Drop it right there and then. I'm exaggerating, but this is probably not a person
3:54you should be hanging out with because none of us need or can have perfect partners. But what
4:00we can have and must search for and must try to become is people who know enough about their
4:06patterns to be able to warn their prospective partners of what's going on and take averting
4:13action. The beginning of therapeutic relationships is to know that two people when entering a couple
4:20are not entering without a lot of history. It is essential that couples learn as much as possible
4:30about that history so that they are ready for the challenges and perplexities of love. A therapeutic
4:36relationship requires that each partner get on top of their dynamics, that date back to childhood,
4:42and are able to discuss them with relative grace, patience, and insight with their partner so that
4:49when problems arise and they will, they can adopt a therapeutic language. It is therapeutic to say,
4:57for example, when there is a conflict, I hear your point of view. It may not be mine, but I hear that
5:03it's yours. It is not therapeutic to say, you're wrong, you're an idiot, and you're just like your
5:09mother or indeed like your father. This is not therapeutic. I'm kidding, but I'm making a very
5:14serious point. Indeed, we do not tend to talk to each other in therapeutically informed language.
5:20We shout, we scream, we blame, we shape shift, we don't take responsibility. We do all sorts of
5:26things that doom us in relationships. And then we stand back and we say, we're surprised. We
5:30are a society that is obsessed with finding the right person without pausing to think,
5:36how do I become the right person? How do I work on myself? Understanding that cannot be done simply--
5:43and this is paradoxical-- by being on your own. This is another unbelievable mystery. You can't
5:49understand yourself just by being with yourself. You need other people. Why is that? It's like, why
5:56do you need a mirror to see the back of your head? Because we don't have eyes there. We need someone
6:01to help us to see the things that are really hard for us to see. And psychotherapy gives us
6:07a forum in which we can come, tell the therapist about what's going on in our lives, explain what
6:14happened last Monday, explain what happened when we took that trip to New York or Buffalo, wherever
6:20it is, what happened, and then slowly pattern recognition sets in. The therapist is able to go,
6:26it's funny. In that last relationship you did this, this new relationship you're doing that,
6:31and you mentioned that your parent did something that sounds kind of similar. So I wonder what's
6:37going on. And then slowly, insight comes. We start to put the pieces together. We think,
6:41I'm up to something. I'm doing something. And that way is liberation. You can start to break
6:47the unconscious stories that we're living. Psychotherapy works with this concept known as
6:52defenses or defense mechanisms. In other words, these are tools that our minds adopt to try and
6:59shield themselves from accurate knowledge of their own workings. And it's going to sound really odd,
7:04like why don't we just embrace self-knowledge with open arms? Why do we need to run away from
7:10it? The answer is that knowledge of ourselves is frightening. It's really awful to have to learn
7:17certain things. It may make us very anxious. It may make us so sorrowful. It may panic us. And so
7:24we push away unwelcome information. I think that we still perhaps can't quite bear how complicated
7:30we are. We're very squeamish creatures. We don't like to sit with ourselves. We don't like to sit
7:37with our emotions. Self-knowledge remains an enormously elusive goal. I think it is the most
7:45important goal of life. To understand oneself is literally the meaning of life. The ancient
7:51Greeks knew this, "Know thyself" was the most important command in ancient Greek culture and
7:57philosophy. Know thyself, most important thing you could do. If you said nowadays,
8:02in a conversation with friends or colleagues, "What's your goal? "Where are you trying to
8:06get to next year? "What are you trying to do?" Say, "Know thyself." People would go, "That's
8:11a strange person there. "We don't know about this person." It's not an acceptable goal. We know that
8:18it's good to make money. We know that it's good to travel to foreign countries, to learn how to fry
8:23garlic and to learn salsa. It's not particularly esteemed to know yourself. And that's why we
8:30wander around strangers to ourselves and therefore enormously confusing. And let's put it frankly,
8:36dangerous to other people. Because a person who doesn't understand themselves, if confronted with
8:41their behavior will go, "It wasn't me. I didn't do it. "Or I can't think or ask me tomorrow. "They
8:48can't account for themselves. "They don't know why they do the stuff they do. "They will simply,
8:53in a relationship, for example, "bail out of a relationship, going, "It's getting too intense.
8:58"And why? "They don't know. "They don't understand what they themselves are doing." Even though they
9:03may have spent five years learning Spanish, they may have taken an advanced degree in
9:08Japanese. They may be very active in all sorts of ways. They may have learned pottery. They may be
9:14holding down a great job in marketing, something. But the point is, they will not have learned the
9:19really true constituents of emotional functioning because they've been able to get away with it.
9:24And part of the playbook of becoming a better lover is to dial down your defense mechanisms,
9:30to observe them. Typical defense mechanism is to push responsibility onto other people, to
9:35say it's your fault. For example, someone tries to tell you something about yourself. Someone says,
9:40"I think that you're a little bit this "when that happens." And rather than going, "Thank you. "Let
9:47me think about that." You go, "Why are you being rude? "Or, "This is not a good time for me." Or,
9:52"I can't absorb this now." In other words, you push away information that might have helped you.
9:57Not because it's false, but because it's difficult to absorb. And that's often what happens to us.
10:04All of us are involved in defense mechanisms. All of us can't quite bear the full truth about
10:10ourselves. It helps us to go to psychotherapy. I know that, you know, AIs, you know,
10:16deliver some aspects of therapy. It can be good at points. The good thing about a real human being is
10:22that they are not guided just by you. They've got their own independent judgment. And also,
10:27you're in a relationship with them. And that relationship is part of what heals you because the
10:32relationship with the therapist is a harbinger of the relationship that you can then take out into
10:38the world, a relationship of trust and mutual understanding. This is something that AIs not
10:43gonna be able to replace anytime soon. So we need to understand ourselves. We need to understand
10:48the past. And then we need a certain spirit. One of the things that we need in that playbook of
10:52love is a good sense of humor. That could sound superfluous, like, "What on earth?" You know,
10:56"Why do we need a sense of humor?" Well, a sense of humor is a modesty about our capacity to
11:00understand anything. And if we can signal to our partners that, you know, we're a little stupid.
11:06We don't get it. We don't have all the answers. That is a wonderful emollient. It's a wonderful
11:12lubricant to love because it just dials down the temperature. If your partner is able to say, "Ah,
11:19I may not have understood this. "I may not be getting it. That's brilliant." And if they can
11:23make a little joke too, that's great. You know, if two people can learn to see each other as idiots,
11:29but lovable idiots, that's a beautiful moment in love. It could sound negative. It's not. It's
11:34not. It's the most generous thing you can do. We are two blind people helping each other to find
11:40a way forward. If that's the spirit in which we can enter love, that is a spirit of generosity,
11:46a spirit of mutual forgiveness. Too often we get on our high horses. This is the way it is.
11:51I know the answer. This is what I think. That is not a friend of love. So we need, if you like,
11:57a modesty, a humorous modesty. Let me give you another idea. Another thing that we need
12:02in order to make love work is a certain degree of pessimism. You know, optimism is the enemy of
12:10love. If we think that we will have a perfect love story, a love story with no ruffles in it, with no
12:17kinks in it, no, it's not going to happen. We need to accept that even a really good relationship has
12:23constant moments of crisis. And that's okay. The problem is not crisis. The problem is
12:28how do we repair crises? Can we repair them with forgiveness, with understanding, and most of all,
12:33with curiosity? Can we get curious about why we had a bust up? Can we be searching for why
12:41our attachment patterns are not compatible? Can we get interested in why we're difficult to love? And
12:47that way will become easier to love. So pessimism is not an enemy of love, knowing that there is
12:54no such thing as the right person actually helps you to find a good enough person. You know, a few
13:02years ago, I read an essay that went viral. I read it for the New York Times. It was called,
13:07"Why You Will Marry The Wrong Person." Why did that essay go viral? I think it went viral because
13:13people all feel... Sorry, let me correct that. Not all people, but many, many people feel that
13:20they have married the wrong person. And they panic about this and they feel so ashamed. So
13:25here's an essay in the New York Times that says, "Yeah, we're all going to marry the wrong person."
13:30And you know what? It's okay. You don't need to marry the right person. You need to marry
13:35a good enough person. You know, compatibility is not a precondition of love. Compatibility
13:42is the fruit of love. If we get together with someone and we find that there are differences,
13:48right? They have one kind of attachment style. We have another. They like golf. We like tennis.
13:54They like the curtains to be green. We like the curtains to be yellow. Whatever it is. Too often
13:57in modern romantic dating culture, the answer is get out. Just get out. Find someone else.
14:03Find someone better. And that's why all the technological tools are all about putting new
14:08people in front of you. Of course, sometimes you need to find new people. But as much as finding
14:14new people, what you need to do is to learn to live with the people who are in front of you,
14:18with the people that you found. Many of us have already found a good enough partner. And yet we
14:23throw them in the bin because we are taught by romantic culture that we can always find a perfect
14:29person with whom it will click immediately. And this is such a destructive idea. If you think,
14:36you know what? The work starts here. The work starts when you have a problem. Then you roll
14:40up your sleeves and you think, okay, well, I know that I, you know, broadly think this person is a
14:45nice person. Now we're going to work at making sure that it can work. And so we're going to
14:50talk and we're going to take this problem apart. We're going to become like engineers who've got
14:54a malfunctioning machine. We're going to sort it out. This sounds unromantic, doesn't it? Imagine,
15:00imagine saying, in order to make my relationship work, every evening I've talked for an hour in
15:05really patient ways. You think, oh my God, go to Vegas, find someone easier. Well,
15:11good luck to you. Maybe you'll find that person. But for some of us, especially some of us who've
15:15come through difficult relationships, difficult relationships in our past, we may need to go and
15:19do that kind of excavation. Maybe that's fine. I think that a good enough person is someone who
15:25will engage with the business of working towards compatibility. That they won't assume that you are
15:33wrong just because there are problems. They will know how to repair crises. They will know how to
15:38be curious. They will know how to listen. They will know how to be patient. That is compatible
15:43with all sorts of problems. Sexual problems, relational problems, administrative problems,
15:47doesn't matter. You can work through them. So the wrong person is someone who stonewalls, who always
15:53blames you, who blanks out, who says, it's not my responsibility, or it was easier with my ex,
16:00and why are you so difficult, et cetera. These people are trouble because they are refusing
16:05the work of love. So it doesn't matter if you have many, many difficulties. That's okay. The
16:09problem is your attitude to the difficulties. And the solution is an attitude of indulgence,
16:16of curiosity, and of calm consideration of the flaws that unite us all. We are all mad monkeys.
16:23And so long as we've been kind towards the mad monkey and all of us, we'll be okay. One of the
16:29real problems, and there's simply no solution, but we need to accept that there's a real problem,
16:34is how long it takes to work out who we are as lovers, as people interested in relationships, who
16:43we are. It takes so long, and it takes especially long to try and change our patterns. If we are
16:49somebody who sabotages relationships every time that love comes along, how long is that going to
16:54take to unwind this? Well, it takes insight, but then it takes, as it were, work, true work. And
17:00sometimes people go to therapy for six sessions or 12 sessions, and they go, "I haven't changed.
17:05Therapy doesn't work." And let's come back to my earlier example about language. Imagine that you
17:12decided middle age, as an English speaker, to pick up Korean or Finnish. And you went to six lessons,
17:18and you tried to learn Finnish and Korean. And by the end of six lessons, you could barely ask for,
17:22you know, barely say your own name or say hello. And then you blamed it on the whole process,
17:26and you said, "I'm not learning this language. It's rubbish." People would say, "You're being
17:30too impatient." And I think that some of the same holds true for rewiring our emotional language. We
17:36can't pick this up in six sessions or 50 minutes. It takes a long time. A pattern that was laid down
17:41over decades is going to take many, many years to figure it out. It's, I mean, believe me, it's bad
17:48news. I wish it weren't so. Can we do anything in the meantime? Yes, of course we can. We can,
17:54you know, we can be learning and walking. We don't have to pause and just sit by the roadside.
17:58We can be starting on the path of relationships. We can be starting from a, you know, relatively
18:02young age. But we need to be doing the work alongside, and we need to be able to at least do
18:09the first thing, which is to say, "I'm learning. I'm a learner." There's a real difference between
18:14someone who goes, "I know it all," and someone who knows that they are still learning. When Socrates,
18:19the ancient Greek philosopher, was asked why he was the wisest person in antiquity,
18:23he said, "Because I know what I don't know." In other words, that the birth of true wisdom is
18:29associated with the knowledge of your ignorance. I think that's the best way we can proceed also
18:34in relation to our love lives. There are lots of questions that we could learn to ask ourselves and
18:39our partners in order to try and find a better relationship. One of them is this. "When I get
18:46close to you, how does that feel?" Right? "To open up a window onto some of the complexities
18:53that occur when somebody gets close." If I love you, what part of you might worry?
19:02Right? That's a good question. Does any part of you worry? Another really useful question is,
19:09"How do I respond when someone is trying to communicate something to me? Do I stonewall or do
19:15I accept? Am I able to pause and think the issue might be with me? Or do I always have to go, 'I
19:25can't answer that. It's the other person. You're being unfair. You're putting me under pressure.'
19:30What is your level of emotional dexterity?" So that's a good question to be asking yourself as
19:37well. Also, one of the really good questions in any relationship is to say, "How have I annoyed
19:43you? How have I frustrated you?" You know, a lot of what happens between couples is there are
19:48things that are bubbling away beneath the surface that people can't find the courage to say. And
19:54because they can't say them, the problem doesn't improve. The problem gets worse. People can't have
19:59sex anymore. A lot of the reason why people can't have sex has got nothing to do with sex. It's to
20:03do with the fact they feel disconnected and angry and misunderstood. You can't have sex with someone
20:08who you feel misunderstood by or you feel furious with. What helps desire is trust. And the way to
20:14build up trust is to communicate, and particularly communicate, ruptures of trust. So if you want to
20:20have good sex, don't get a candle, don't go to a hotel, start to ask each other, "Have I annoyed
20:26you? Is there something I've done that you'd like to tell me?" And you say this patiently, not in
20:31the middle of the night when you're stressed or maybe you've drunk too much, but when you're calm,
20:36when there's a sense of, you know, lightness and forgiveness, use the right moment to ask
20:42the right question. We're living in a world where therapeutic language and insights have spread for
20:48the first time far outside the consulting room. There is mass adoption at a superficial level
20:54of therapeutic language. And the area where we find this most obviously is social media and in
21:00particular Instagram, which is enormous. It's an enormous force in the world. And it has brought
21:05up a generation, I'd say, to speak in pseudo or vaguely therapeutic terms. I don't mean that as
21:13an insult. Some of these insights have been fantastic. People are now able to talk about,
21:17let's say, attachment theory, the, you know, the mention of an avoidant attachment theory or an
21:22anxious attachment theory in many circles now doesn't create the puzzlement that it
21:26was generating 15 years ago. 15 years ago, this was not common knowledge. That was still in the
21:30university, in textbooks and in the consulting room. Now it's out in the world. And the medium
21:35that has changed this, as I say, is social media. What's the problem? I'll tell you one
21:39of the problems. One of the problems is whose fault it is. The tone of a lot of social media
21:47posting blames the problem for the struggles in relationships, fairly and squarely on the partner,
21:53not on yourself. There is an obsession with finding borderline people, narcissistic people,
22:00avoidance, anxious people, out in the world. And of course they exist. But the tone is the problem.
22:06The tone says, get out. These are red flags and everybody that you're meeting, the reason why you
22:13haven't made a relationship work is because these people are unbalanced psychologically. My answer
22:19is this. If you are looking to find a person with no problems at all, with no psychological
22:25disturbances, good luck to you. If you're looking to find somebody with no red flags, good luck to
22:30you. Everybody has red flags. That's part of what it means to be human. That's the story of Genesis.
22:36A story of Genesis is Adam and Eve had some red flags. That's what it is to be human being,
22:42is somebody with a red flag. So the problem is not the red flag, it's how you deal with it. And
22:47this is what I worry that therapeutic culture on social media doesn't train us to do. It doesn't
22:52train us for patience. It doesn't train us to think we might be the problem. It doesn't ask
22:56us to think what we've brought to the situation. It doesn't create an atmosphere of forgiveness.
23:02The reason is very simple. Outrage sells. It's more fun. It feels more spirited. It's punchier
23:10to say that ex of yours, they're the avoidant, they're crazy, they're narcissistic. It sounds
23:17better and it leaves everybody happier. But long term, it's not the solution.